Sean Wilentz exposes the Trumpian distortions of the American past; Andrew DelBanco on the tribulations of the American university; Lewis Hyde explains what American history teaches about ICE; Armando Chaguaceda presents the creed of a Cuban dissident; Meg Vlaun on retreating to the mountains; Roxana Saberi interviews riot police on the streets of Iran; Ihab Hassan a Palestinian’s indictment of Hamas; Carissa Veliz a non-Luddite tribute to an analog existence; Michael C. Kimmage Melville’s oceanic parable of democratic citizenship; Arash Azizi the patriotism of a progressive; Mark Lilla on the unbeautiful nature of politics; Robert Alter on how the Bible does a lot with a little; Len Gutkin on the persistence of the political in the reading of literature; Kai Sina the strenuous liberalism and Zionism of Thomas Mann; Nadia Jamil Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry of empathy; Tamar Glezerman on mourning far away from home; Ani Chkhikvadze discovers the occult in the nation’s capital; Celeste Marcus on rape in polite society; Leon Wieseltier the meanings of patriotism in our semiquincentennial; and old poetry by Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Carrie Williams Clifford, Frances Harper, John Greenleaf Whittier, Herman Melville, Phoebe Cary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ambrose Bierce, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane.
Friday, July 24, 2026
6:30pm - 9:30pm EDT
Yahia Lababidi discusses his recent Liberties essay "Secretaries of Silence" with Morten Høi Jensen. The essay is about the relationship between Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton.
James Wolcott and Morten Høi Jensen discuss Wolcott's essay "Gloire Days" and Trump's obsession with Mar-a-Lago.
June 29, 2026
It is a very unhappy birthday for the American Republic, to say the least. These days, barely a week goes by when Franklin’s admonition upon leaving the Constitutional Convention “ — if you can keep it” doesn’t echo in the mind. As the inauspicious sestercentennial approaches, the summer is already shaping up to be a...
Read More Read MoreJune 22, 2026
To Posterity When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards And reading and even speaking have been replaced By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste They held for us for whom they were framed in words, And will your...
Read More Read MoreJune 15, 2026
Thrust into time and space, everybody enters in medias res. What had come before? Readers, as Trollope noted long ago, prefer the cart ...
Read More Read MoreJune 8, 2026
In loving memory of Irwin Berl Nadler, 1952-2023 There are moments — small, almost absurd moments — when one realizes that one has crossed a threshold, a personal, religious, historical, or intellectual threshold — without quite noticing the warning sign on the door, or even the door. Mine came in the form of an...
Read More Read MoreJune 1, 2026
I This year’s Berlin International Film Festival opened on a rare sunny winter’s day in the German capital. In the early afternoon of February 12, the international jury, led by its president Wim Wenders, filed into the Grand Hyatt for the opening press conference. Film festival veterans are used to these tedious rituals, the lazy...
Read More Read MoreMay 25, 2026
Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and Flaubert scholar (who drew on the methods of the Cahiers du Cinema critics of the ‘50s in...
Read More Read MoreMay 18, 2026
What do we want from our idols? Devotion to their ideals, of course, a keen sense of self-mythos, preferably an exalted capacity to live as they preach. On a cursory glance, Jack Kerouac appears to meet these standards. The Buddhist Years, a collection of Kerouac’s previously unpublished drafts, diary entries, poems, and scribbles, excavating his...
Read More Read MoreMay 11, 2026
How many great women painters have been honored by history? In 1948, the writer Edward James claimed there were just seven female masters: Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosalba Carriera, Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Angelica Kaufmann, Rosa Bonheur, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot. It was a relatively new phenomenon to have a successful woman artist, he wrote, thanks...
Read More Read MoreFriday, July 24, 2026
6:30pm - 9:30pm EDT
Listen to Liberties on your favorite podcast service.
Yahia Lababidi discusses his recent Liberties essay "Secretaries of Silence" with Morten Høi Jensen. The essay is about the relationship between Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton.
James Wolcott and Morten Høi Jensen discuss Wolcott's essay "Gloire Days" and Trump's obsession with Mar-a-Lago.
